Cooking With Dexter: Busy Signal

My father left the office at 5. If he wasn’t home by 5:30, we knew he had hit traffic. To the opening theme of the 6 o’clock news, we sat down to eat the meal my mother prepared.

In later years, like many men of my generation, I learned to cook. This skill has given me far more happy hours than, say, knowing how to change spark plugs. Years ago, it helped impress Susan, the woman I would eventually marry. After my two sons, Dexter and Elliot, came along, I often cooked for them, and later, with them. Two years ago, I started this column with the idea that keeping tabs on the meals prepared by a working father who cooks might add up to some kind of reflection of the way today’s families eat. It hasn’t exactly worked out that way. What has become clear, now that I’m writing the final Cooking With Dexter column, is just how little cooking I’ve done, with or without my 6-year-old.

On Sundays, yes, there have been breakfasts of pancakes and waffles and, just the other morning, green eggs and ham. On Saturdays I’ve shopped for and applied heat to tightly wound purple cabbages, black beans dried last summer, mackerel with tarnished-silver skins.

From Monday morning through Friday night, though, it’s all I can do to get home from the office in time to watch the boys brush their teeth. I did not embark on this column with the idea that it would make me wiser, but I have definitely learned something about cooking for a family at the end of a day spent in an office: It’s very, very hard to do.

These days, those of us with jobs count ourselves lucky, and if we like our jobs and the money we make too, we know we’re even luckier. But that can be hard to keep in mind when riding home after dark, returning one last call or jabbing out the answers to a few more e-mails, hoping there is nobody reading on the other end who will lob the exchange back at you. There will be more of this before you fall into bed, more in the dark if you are the restless type, and just before breakfast it will begin again.

In some circles, it has become kind of cool lately to talk about those of us who don’t manage to cook for our families as an abstract but urgent societal problem. We are the people who don’t have time to cook or — I particularly enjoy this phrasing — the people who say they don’t have time to cook. Because of us, society is coming unglued. Our children are eating processed foods and fast foods, and it’s making them fat and sick.

Photo

Credit
Jens Mortensen for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Molly Rundberg.

Those who worry about this problem have a number of proposed solutions to “get people cooking again.” I’ve got one of my own: a federal law that requires everybody to leave work at 5, as my father did. I’d vote for that. But then because somebody has to put dinner on the table by 5:30 or 6, you’d need another law that would prohibit more than one parent per family from working full time. I wouldn’t vote for that, even if it did get Americans back in the kitchen.

What I’ve learned in the past two years is that when people say they’re too busy to cook, it isn’t like when they tell their doctors they exercise three, maybe four times a week. They mean it: they’re too busy to cook, or at least too busy to cook dinner every night of the week before the children go to bed. Since the golden age of home cooking — if there ever was such a time — parents work more. And more parents work. If you add up the hours worked by all the adults in the average American household, the change is profound, epochal. In many families, there is nobody around to do housework of any kind, including buying and preparing food.

If you enjoy cooking, this might strike you as a tragic turn of history. But if you don’t, the proposition that we have to get people cooking again makes as much sense as arguing that wives need to go back to ironing their husbands’ shirts.

Even for me, there have been times over the past few years when cooking felt like drudgery. My lowest moments in the kitchen have come when the boys were long past the point of needing food, right now, and I was insistently plowing forward with some from-scratch meal. They would be garroting each other under the table, I would be beating an egg with a fork, dipping a sole fillet into it, then rolling the fish in bread crumbs (fresh! homemade!) and slipping it into the cast iron skillet. There’s yellow police tape at the front door, the detectives are on their knees drawing chalk outlines on the floor and I’m at the stove, reminding myself that sauter means “to jump.”

On nights like that, what I probably needed was something edible that I could transfer from the freezer to the microwave to the table quickly. After all, there’s nothing wrong with processed food. The problem is bad processed food. Instead of cajoling people to get “back” into the kitchen and shaming them into avoiding processed foods, it might be more helpful to work on turning out proc­essed foods and fast foods that taste like more than just salt and grease and that don’t make kids fat and sick.

Without question, I also needed something more traditional: a wife. Susan holds the family together. She works, but not in an office, so she can steal time from herself to take care of the boys. While I am still swinging at e-mails in the batter’s box of my cubicle each night, she feeds them. While I am looking around for a clean shirt in the morning, she packs Dexter’s lunchbox. When I think that in the early days of our romance I wooed her by cooking, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that she is the victim of one of the greatest bait-and-switch schemes of all time.

Because the children eat so early, she and I have dinner after they go to bed. Usually, this is my turn to cook, while she has a glass of wine. This arrangement works only because she has already done the shopping. Like a television chef, I walk into a fully stocked kitchen.

Late last month, we had a few people — adults — over for dinner. I made Susan’s favorite dish, spaghetti and meatballs. I even bought all the ingredients, down to the fresh oregano and the bacon. Now, I have issues with spaghetti and meatballs. To me, they’re two separate dishes. But to Susan, they are indivisible. And so we ate them the way I did when I was a boy, a big swirl of pasta with the meatballs riding on top. It wasn’t much, but it was my birthday gift for the woman who was cooking for Dexter while I was only writing about it.

A version of this article appears in print on February 20, 2011, on page MM22 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: COOKING WITH DEXTER: BUSY SIGNAL. Today's Paper|Subscribe